Dijala Hasanbegović

DIJALA HASANBEGOVIĆ is a poet, freelance journalist, and literary critic. She studied Comparative Literature and Bosnian language at the University of Sarajevo. She worked for the Bosnian weekly magazine Dani as a literary and theatre critic and as an editor at Radio Sarajevo news portal. She has published essays, poetry, and critiques for various literary magazines. Her poems have been translated into English and Polish; her first poem in English translation was published in The American Poetry Review (September 2007). Dijala lives in Sarajevo and is a member of the Sarajevo Writers’ Workshop. She is currently a columnist for Diskriminacija, a portal dedicated to fighting social, racial, gender, and other forms of discrimination in the region. Her columns, designed to present different life stories of fictional characters, describe the specific problems of those who are considered to be socially deviant. Her work for Diskriminacija is being translated into English.

Dijala Hasanbegović

A Lexicon of Great Historical Moments

Leksikon velikih povijesnih trenutaka

Dunja’s laughter always spilt and rolled round the attic like warm chestnuts. Even today, my sister laughs like a child.

I came to live with Dunja, my uncle’s daughter, when I was six years old, after my mum died. When my stepfather and his new wife wanted to send me to an orphanage a month after mum’s death, because the woman had a son of her own and didn’t want any other children, I ran away from home to an abandoned watermill near the village, and I refused to come out.

On the base of our old house telephone, my neighbour found my uncle’s number, which mum had pasted there in case of emergency. He lived on his wife’s farm, a few dozen kilometres from us. He was a stranger to me, this man who came to take me to my new home on a stuffy August morning. Dunja was a stranger, too—her eyes dark and sparkly, wide yet sunken, her eyebrows thin and curvy, her face as narrow as a doe’s.

We were too little and too lonely not to become like sisters. From initial sulking to unconditional love, only a few weeks passed. Somewhere in her irises I found the colours of my family, of my mother. Every day I tried to recognise something of my own in her. In our room in the attic, we sprouted into one another. Our limbs grew over our short childrens' beds. At night our retinas, and much later our cigarette embers, sparkled by the tiny open window.

“Knock-knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Lou Reed.”

“Lou who?”

“Lou Reed has got good weed.”

It was quiet at the dining table, unlike in the other rooms where we gathered. Dunja’s mother lorded over the silence like a white wraith, always dressed in white dresses which billowed round her body like clouds round hillsides. She was small, plump, and attractive with dark, attentive eyes and a face ever relaxed into a grimace of surrender—even when she was angry, the expression on her face never matched the glare of her eyes and the tone of her voice. My uncle and his wife were on conspicuously cold terms. The kisses they doled out to each other were a pantomime of habit, a discreet signal of putting up with one another or of a loveless alliance.

After supper, Dunja and her father would read books alone in the living room till bedtime, and I would take a long bath, watching the moths trapped in the white ceiling light in our tiny bathroom. I would leave messages on the mirror, counting rhymes, verses, but also ordinary, banal questions for Dunja (“Where is my blue jumper?”) which she would answer in the morning after she, too, had fogged the mirror up.

The book Dunja and her father read the most, the one I thought he considered the most important, was called A Lexicon of Great Historical Moments. As Dunja grew up, the Lexicon was supplanted by other books. It ended up in our room, and we wrote our own version of history in the margins, wrote down things we wanted to remember, and doodled nonsensical drawings. My uncle had filled his provincial home with history and philosophy books. They were ancient, though—all written in the fifth decade of the previous century. About ten of them were neatly arranged on a shelf by my aunt’s figurine of a girl with a ewer of water. Their pages smelt sweet and sour, like stale biscuits, and the letters in them were grey and thick. On the shelf beneath, vinyl records were lined up. Uncle was deeply tormented by the fact that he’d never left the village in order to study in the city.

We loved the fragrant, pleasant, wet summers in our village. Dunja, Uncle, and I would go to the river together. I would swim; Dunja would mostly sit by her father on the grass. We would return at night, tired, and drip dry under Dunja’s mother’s gaze, which smouldered behind the kitchen curtains.

One summer I fell in love.

The following summer, I panicked and ripped the Egyptian cotton sheets, Dunja’s parents’ wedding gift, bloodied by my first period, off my bed and buried them in the meadow.

“Knock-knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“The train.”

“Train who?”

“Slow, slow train comin’ up around the bend!”

One winter, when we were almost fifteen, snow fell three-and-a-half metres deep, and we all shovelled shiny, crunchy piles of ice in front of our houses. Days, short and cold, flickered like stars in the deep, dark winter. We didn’t even go to school. Uncle shovelled for two days, then he started complaining about his injured knee and stayed in the house most of the time. He was darker, more worried. As early as the previous autumn, he had started saying that the local school wasn’t good enough for us, especially for Dunja, and that she should read more if she wanted to go to university.

Evenings in the living room were long and stuffy. In the end, Dunja’s mother would sit there alone. In the light of the TV set, in the semi-darkness, shone her expressionless face. On the screen sobbed actresses with large, dark, made-up eyes.

Round ten o’clock every night, just when Dunja’s mother would go to bed, my uncle would knock on our door, or he would tap his ceiling with something, which was a signal for Dunja to come down to his room, where they’d read longer than they usually would in the living room. That became routine over time. I would stay and listen to myself breathe in a hive of warm light. I’d fall asleep only after the squeaking of our door ran down my legs like shivers when Dunja came in. And so every night. We never talked about it.

“Knock-knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Silence.”

“Silence who?”

“My love she speaks like silence, without ideals or violence!”

The long, dark winter roared deeply with the rumble of the trains from the nearby railway station, and the bowl of light in which our candle suffocated was shaking. Shadows, photos, and postcards danced on the walls, and on one such night, Dunja walked in and sat on the bed, hurriedly moving her unbraided hair off her face, her whole body shaking together with the room, which flickered before me amid the noise. I averted my gaze as if frightened by her words, and I felt tears in my eyes as I watched our shadows out on the white snow, shadows which the light of the candle shaped into giants. Tall. Voiceless.

I turned around, and I saw Dunja on the bed, writing something into the Lexicon with my eyeliner, leaning in with her whole body. She pushed the book into my hands in a sudden, feverish movement, almost putting out the candle, and I read the greasy, jerky letters writhing all over the chapter on the Roman Empire. The faded illustrations ran red and yellow, like blood and lymph, on the crown on Emperor Nero’s head and the small blue grapes in the hands of the court whores and my sister’s broken letters. I kept my gaze fixed on those few words longer than I should have; tears were boiling under my eyelashes. Dunja snatched the Lexicon from my hands, continued to write, and I nodded. Dunja wasn’t crying. I was. Dunja wrote in four sentences, short, terrifying, black sentences, all the agony of her winter in her father’s room, and our shame and sorrow were absorbed by the smell of old paper and crayon. In complete silence, as the extinguished wick was swinging in a thin thread of black smoke, I promised Dunja that we would carry out the plan we had written down.

Sitting at the table in the following days and months became unbearable. I ate in front of the telly with the dog. Dunja’s mum gave up on her intention to force me to eat with them. She fell ill that winter and stopped cooking. Slowly, Dunja and I took over the household. Dunja became a demon of peace. Her face hewed itself into a sculpture of weary determination, her eyes turned matte black, her movements lost their sprightliness, and her long woollen skirt rocked on her hips like a tired bird. Uncle was angry and loud in the moments when I mustered up the strength to look at him, and my gaze was as heavy as a shame that wasn’t mine. The whole house turned into a monument to the silence in which his voice rang out. In time, he started to go to the inn after work and would return home later and later.

The years which followed seemed a vacuum, a notime and noplace in which we staggered along, gazing into the obscure, hazy horizon that we may have made up.

Three winters passed, as did two tonsil removal surgeries, two sets of A-level exams, sweaty nights spent over books, the acrid smell of morning coffee, while our plans were budding in the grass—white, tiny, bold, and fragile like the first meadow flowers from the wet, cold soil.

Dunja’s mother died in spring, eight days before my eighteenth birthday. The day was white, ironed out, cold, yet resolutely bright. Dunja and I went home after the funeral, stepping on the muddy paved path between the graves. In my bag rustled some papers, books, some money, and my mobile. Uncle went with his friends to get drunk. I saw him turning around as we were getting off the main road and onto the path leading to our farm. Our gazes met when I looked over my shoulder. I fixed his till he turned around.

Dunja and I didn’t say a single word from the time we got back in the house to the time we went out again. We had dinner and then went up to the attic to have a nap.

“Knock-knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Forever.”

“Forever who?”

“There’s no forever for me and you.”

At suppertime, Dunja played a Bob Dylan LP. I went upstairs and then back down with a canister full of heavy, pungent, sharp, liquid stink, which set off bizarre revelries in my head and woke up the senses I didn’t even know I had.

The vagabond who's rapping at your doorIs standing in the clothes that you once woreStrike another match, go start anewAnd it's all over now, Baby Blue...

Three times I went back to the attic, and I emptied five canisters of petrol all over the old house. Round midnight, as the province slept, we tossed two matches, which ignited a path of soaked grass leading to the porch.

The house caught fire, and long would the white flash remain our only childhood memory. Dunja wrote into her father’s Lexicon on the last, empty page:

“On 13 April 2000, Azra and Dunja left their family home. Flames swallowed the small village by the river on that Sunday night. They never returned.”

On the slope of the nearby hill, the great fire shaped our shadows into giants. Tall. Voiceless.